First published: June, 1993. First posted online: December 18, 2005.
Actually, you’ve already met the Clerds, back in this episode. But in the original script, their names were simply listed as “Country Drow Mother” and “Country Drow Son”.
Yes, we’re using the d-word again here, because we have to in order to focus our parody power on the phenomenon of the “drowboy”. Yes, the drowboy. Fantasy’s original metrosexual. But there’s a down-home side to drowboys, too.
Freznip puts the whole Drizzt myth into proper perspective: Look how unhappy Drizzt is all the time. Silly blonde, he thinks too much! But responsible dark elf moms like Clerd are literally the salt of the earth, and know how to raise their beautiful sons to become happy housewives. She’d never let Freznip near a “weapons master”– everyone knows what kind of boys hang around them. No, the only knives Freznip knows about are those in the kitchen. Oh, and of course, he’s exposed to the realities of dark elf farm life. The time came eventually when his favorite giant lizard, Spotty, had to be slaughtered for the meat. But his tears were assuaged when he got a plush lizard doll for his next birthday. “Spotty II” has been on his bed ever since.
So anyway: We’d like your help. Who invented the word “drowboy”? We know we popularized it starting in June, 1993, but is this the first time it saw print or net exposure? We used the term at least as early as 1981, but that’s just as a private, mostly in-game, neologism. Who’s responsible for getting the word out first? (Earliest listing in Usenet groups is November 1997.) Here’s the topic in the Yamara Forums, We have comments enabled [June 2011] and if anyone wants to add to the odd history of the word, or what it has meant to them over the years, fire away.
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